


Set Alight

by Alona



Category: The Huntsman (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-28 23:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12617972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona/pseuds/Alona
Summary: A beast is abroad in Snow White's kingdom, heralding worse to come.





	Set Alight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Damkianna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damkianna/gifts).



The young Queen, pure and good, sat upon the throne. Around her the realm knew peace. The realm flourished. 

It took time for anyone to notice that there was sickness in its flourishing. In happened so gradually, and they were all blinded by the joy of their Queen's ascension. 

The first harvest of her reign was rich beyond imagining, and the people of the kingdom praised the Queen for healing the land. Anywhere the least blade of grass could take root, lush wilderlands sprang up in miniature, green as emeralds, green as ocean depths, green as storm-bearing skies.

In the second year of the young Queen's rule, the harvest was too plentiful to be taken in fully. There were not enough men. There was not enough time. What could not be brought in was left to rot on the vine, in the earth. Unpicked fruit fell from the trees to rot on the ground. Birds and insects covered the fields of grain that stood untouched for want of labor. A sickness came upon those living closest to the rotting, scavenger-covered fields, a fever that was mild but lasting and left those it touched wandering. 

At lambing season, later, the ewes brought forth misshapen young in great numbers, young with sharp teeth and glistening scales and too many eyes. It was the same with the cows, the goats, the horses, the cats, all the animals kept in the realm. Then the sea, which had resisted even the rule of Ravenna, vomited forth hideous life, fish with no eyes but with many mouths lined up on their flanks, fish that were nothing but eyes, pale and bulbous, enormous fish grown inside out so their bones and entrails were exposed. 

The farmers and the fishermen came to the castle with their complaints. But there already a greater fear held its inmates in thrall. 

For weeks now they had heard that a beast walked the land at night. It left devastation in its wake. Farms ruined, houses trampled, trees uprooted. The Queen's new roads were dug up and defiled. Lost fishing boats washed ashore as torn driftwood. Any who chanced to be out of doors when the beast walked went missing, and their remains were not found. Animals, wild and tame, greeted the beast as a friend when it appeared. The most faithful hounds ran baying towards it and returned wild and mistrustful when it had passed. 

The first to see the beast clearly were the duke's son and the Queen's huntsman, who had gone out in answer to reports of this new threat. It appeared to them upon the beach before the castle, glowing in the moonlight. 

It had, the duke's son said after, the shape of a great swan. Its feathers were white and iridescent as scales, its beak blood red. It was very beautiful. The huntsman, who did not flinch from evil, hesitated a heartbeat before attacking it. The beast cast him aside and walked into the water, vanishing beneath the moonlight-frosted waves. Then it broke the waves and rose, its wingspan as wide as the sky. All the seabirds that nested in the caves nearby flew out of their nests and filled the air with their wings and their cries, flocking around the beast. Then beast and birds were gone, and all was still. 

By the blue light of morning, the Queen woke in her bedchamber, with its tall windows and its cool sheets, and she sat up gasping, with her hand pressing her thin night gown where her heart raced. Her hair was matted with sweat and blood. Her pillow was wet with seawater and tears. 

What dreams had Queen Snow White seen? I did not know. I could be as close to her as her own unblemished skin, could feel the sickness in her stomach, hear the beat of her blood in her ears, taste the foul staleness in her mouth. But I had not yet taken the strength I needed from her to enter her mind. 

It was only a matter of time. 

I, Ravenna, whom the king's daughter had slain, had not gone. I remained, tethered to this world, for with Snow White's birth one had been born into the world to whom my very soul was bound. One of us could not truly die while the other lived. 

The knowledge had come to me late, but not too late to be useful. The enormous power that was hers, her purity and her connection to the land, lay open for my taking. My corruption. From the merest faltering shade I had fed for two years upon her strength until I could think clearly, could almost take a physical shape. I had not anticipated how this would touch Snow White herself, but I rejoiced to see it. 

For the beast terrorizing her kingdom was none other than Snow White herself, transformed. And she had no idea. 

 

Or perhaps she did know. I had made the mistake before of thinking pure meant simple. I had underestimated her, and she would have been my undoing. Now I had only to wait, and she would be my resurrection. 

I had thought the waiting would be tedious. Watching the subjects that had taken life from me simper before her. Watching her squander her gifts in futile attempts to be good, to please all, to be fair according to their lights, when those simple fools did not know what it was they wanted. But I had seen none of that. 

Oh, she was clever. How had I not expected it? 

She had roused the wilting duke and his flabby followers into an attack they must have thought was suicide. With victory behind her she could make them do anything she wanted. She held her power with an alien, offhand grace I could neither understand nor look away from. What a Queen she would have been, what a reign she would have known—if not for me. 

It would be glory beyond what I had imagined to steal all that from her. 

When she ordered the muster of a force to attack the beast, I was beside her in the throne room. When she spoke to the mustered force in the courtyard of the palace, I stood at her shoulder unseen, watching the adoring faces of the men. When, at sundown, she went to the royal chapel alone, bidding no one to disturb her until morning came, I followed her. I might almost have lounged upon the altar of her toy god as she knelt to pray. 

Her clasped hands trembled, and tears started from her closed eyes. She was afraid. She knew. 

Cold stone under her knees. Smoke in the air from a candle guttering in the iron ring by the chapel door. Her breath, coming in quick, stinging gasps. 

And when the unwilling change came over her, I was with her then, too, the two of us soaring into the dark sky. 

The beast Queen met her own soldiers, led by her two favorites, upon the same beach where she had led a charge against me. The clash was hideous. The beast, more serpent than swan on this night, but still pearl-white and perilously fair, fought viciously. Any poet would have rejoiced to witness the scene and paint it in verse. There were no poets among the fighters, but perhaps I would find one later and describe it to him. It pleased me to think of hearing this night of blood remembered in song. 

I had known a king once who had loved beast fights above all other pastimes. A low sort of entertainment. They had been held in a pit dug out in what had been the castle dungeon. He had slavered like an animal himself, watching starving wolves and dogs tear hunks out of each other while men cheered and groaned and coins exchanged hands. When he was dead, I fed his body to those same wretched curs. 

That sport he had so relished had been a pale, twisted shadow of the struggle I watched now. 

They were evenly matched, the beast and the warriors. Or they would have been. In the mind of the beast the consciousness of Snow White the Queen was waking, and the beast could not fight with its mind divided. It took gashes to its sharp-edged wings, a stab to its feathered breast. But it lashed out, the madness whelming with the pain, and dealt back the damage it had received. Many of the Queen's warriors died upon that beach. 

And then the beast escaped. Its flight was less graceful now. 

With the sky just beginning to lighten, the beast washed up on the rocks below the castle, far from its pursuers. The feathers withered to black quills and withdrew under the skin; the glistening pallor of the skin dulled and flushed with life; the body contorted, writhing; then the Queen, spattered in gore and still clad in the last shreds of her gown, crawled the last yard up the beach on hands and knees, vomiting bile and seawater onto the cutting rocks. 

She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes, her chest heaving. Then her eyes opened wide. 

I could look out through her eyes now. Could see myself, restored, standing over her, a tower of beauty and strength, flawless and ageless as the day she had come against me. I had conjured a robe of crow's-wing black to wrap myself in. My hair fell golden as ripe wheat about me. I smiled, and my smile was death in all its dreadful beauty. 

"No!" 

Her hoarse protest, stronger than I would have expected.

She raised herself to her knees. "I killed you."

"Did you think it would be that easy? Truly?" I felt a hideous laugh wrestling to escape me and bit it back behind a cold smile. I could be calm, could be gracious now. My triumph approached. I curled and uncurled my fingers, returned to flesh at last. 

"How? How have you done this?" 

Her voice was meek, her head bowed, but by now I knew better than to trust that. At her side her hand was scrabbling for a rock sharp enough for her purpose.

"Don't think I cannot see what you are doing. Will you stab me with that pebble?"

She seized my robe, and I felt myself dragged down before her. The rock flew at my face. My muscles were slow to respond. My stolen magic would not come to me. For a moment, and a moment only, I froze in frustrated rage. Where was it, the magic I had counted on? How could my triumph fail to be all I had expected? 

Snow White did not hesitate. 

We grappled on the stony shore, washed by waves, cut by the myriad sharp edges of the rocks. Blood from her wounds smeared us both. 

Her pathetic stone, wielded with unflagging focus, crashed against my shoulder. It sliced my arm, my cheek. I knocked it from her hand. 

Where does a princess, a Queen, learn to brawl like a stable boy? Elbows and knees flying, a hand yanking my hair, a thumb in my eye. She had not fought like this before. Armored, filled up with holy purpose, she had chosen a direct attack, and when that had failed, the guile of turning her weakness against me. Now she fought with the desperate struggle of the beast. 

But I knew a more precise way to fight. In a bloody, thrashing minute I had her subdued, my knee on her chest, my hands pinning her wrists. Her dark hair spread like a tangle of seaweed beneath her head. 

"Why do you still fight?" I asked. "Give up your power, and it will all be easier. You cannot hope to match me. Or don't you remember that you have been fighting already this night, oh Queen?"

"You." She choked as she spoke. "It's been your doing all along." 

I leaned down until I could see my face and nothing else reflected in her eyes. "I have only begun." 

"What do you want, Ravenna? Eternal life? You can't have it." She could hardly get breath to finish her phrases, but she kept going, sullen and wheezing, no longer trying to throw me off. "My kingdom? They will fight for it. They'll fight you to their last breath. You'll rule a kingdom of corpses and die among ashes." 

"Let it be so. I will see you beside me, dying, broken and friendless." 

Her eyes darted from side to side. Her red mouth gaped and drew back in a fierce grimace. "What's changed?"

"What?"

"You can't kill me…" 

With the realization I was not quick enough to quash she gathered strength. She raised herself, pushing me from her. We had each other by the shoulders, struggling almost without movement. Only the quivering of our arms spoke of the terrible effort. 

"You'd have killed me just now, if you meant to. It's not my heart you need now, is it? It's me, alive." And she slammed her forehead into mine with all her force. 

I groaned my fury, but for the instant I was stunned. She escaped me and hobbled back into the water. A breath, and I followed. 

We stood with the water rising to our hips. Day had broken during our struggle. Sunlight gleamed on the water. Sunlight fell onto Snow White's face, and she narrowed her eyes against it. 

She said, "I'll drown myself if you try anything." 

"I don't believe you." 

"To stop you, I would do worse." She stepped closer to me through the water. Blood ran from her nose over her mouth. "I've been dead. I'll face it again, if it means you'll be gone for good." She stepped closer still, into my shadow, and a look I could not bear to have turned on me was in her face, puzzled and earnest, a double-edged spear of interest and pity that stabbed us both. Horror prickled up my spine. Her voice, with that callous edge of childishness, was soft. "Is that what you want?" 

This confrontation had not gone as I had intended. There had been no dignity in our squabble, and there was none in this moment, both of us battered, both of us shaking and buffeted by waves. It was lucky there was no witness. 

There was no witness to see that I, Ravenna, held my new-returned breath as the girl Queen raised her bloody hands to my face. Did she mean to heal me? Even me, even now? 

I flung out the only barb left to me, which was the truth. "So you have been dead? I have known death, too, and in death my mirror whispered to me. The mirror told me that we were eternally bound. That your soul is a match for mine. I refused to believe it. You, a match for me? Ravenna has no match." A frown had formed on her clear brow, and she was shaking her head in denial. I covered her hands with mine where they lay against my cheeks. "You show promise, though. I have watched you all this time. Even in death, little Queen, yours and mine, you would not escape me. Once I would have rebelled, but now I rejoice in it." 

And there was no witness but the rising sun when I took her into my arms and kissed her. Her blood was on my tongue, and it had more savor for me than the most priceless wine.

"You remember?" I whispered. "I was the first to kiss you like this. Did you truly have no idea that it was me wearing your dear friend's face?" 

She was frozen, staring, and before she could recover I dragged her head back by her hair, smearing my bloody lips down the line of her throat. I bit down, not hard enough to break skin but hard enough to bruise. She was struggling now, choking out protests that fell off into frustrated groans. I raised my head and stifled her words with another kiss, pressing our two bruised, battered bodies close, snaking my hand through the rents in her gown to push my fingers into the fresh welts on her back from where the soft skin had scraped the rocks during our fight. She shuddered. The hands that had been fighting to push me away instead clutched frantically at me. Her teeth sank into my lip. It was meant as an attack, no doubt, but I had never known a more voluptuous pain. I laughed. 

Then she hooked her foot around my ankle and together we went sprawling slowly, held up for the space of a shared heartbeat by the billow of a wave. Our eyes met. Hers were wide and frightened. In the instant before we hit the water together, I felt her reach for me. 

And the break came that I had looked for. All this time she had withheld her power from me by a force of will I could scarcely believe. Now all at once it fell away. I grabbed for it greedily, tore it from her as I crashed into the water. 

It was mine. 

I leapt out of her clutching arms and into the air as a cloud of black birds.

Freedom!

The open sky at last! 

Snow White had regained her footing and stood still in the water, rooted like a white tree withstanding the force of the waves. 

In that last moment her mind had been open to me. Her fear, her pity, her bewilderment. Her guilty excitement. She had always thought me beautiful, I knew. Now that she understood our connection she had already begun to imagine how she might redeem me after all, knowing all the time that it was futile. Underneath it all was a well of horror and dread, for she had no way of knowing whether the monstrous transformation had left her. She had attacked her own kingdom, slain her own people. I had done it through her, but she had been the weapon. 

Yet there was no hatred for me in her heart, and that seared me as though the sun had come down to brush my hundreds of wings. 

Wings that were black, yes, but slashed with white. Unthinking, I had taken flight as a tiding of magpies. 

All my wings flashed in the sun as I put distance between myself and the castle and the bewildered Queen. And behind her, on the shore, the sun flashed, too, off the weapons and armor of her retainers, who had much too late come in search of her.


End file.
